The devil is just a typo away
30/10/2007
Dear u, I am pretty tired when I finally arrive home from my aunty’s funeral. I and the corpse suffered irrational unrelated oratory from an unconnected priest to the deceased. We perused funeral programmes plagiarised from the illustrious previous dead, complete with ‘him’ instead of ‘her’ and ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ and ‘as we remember Mr Friday Diehard’’ instead of ‘as we remember Mrs Lydia Kokumo’ causing amusement or anguished consternation to the audience or congregation depending on their individual reasons for attending the funeral celebration of the Mass. We grimaced as a queenly white and gold paint embossed coffin nearly dropped in the maniacal MIC, Mission Into Cemeteries, Endtimes trumpeted dance to the grave silence.
But like you I am among the growing group that is never too tired to make contact with the human aliens out there on the other side of cyberspace- my e-mail friends – in a chat room linking distant citizens and sometimes unknown neighbours. Remember that the e-mail costs a fixed rate on my computer, used or used less. So more is less loss. So I use it maximally even when I am tired.
Yawning, I type in an e-mail to my friend shell@yahoo.com who should be ready to make contact from the other side. For the record, I always type my notes in italics and I get replies in the opposite of itialics- nonitalic ‘normal’ text. It’s a call sign with me. Take me with my italics or leave me alone and unread. Period.
The screen sprang to life with words as I typed but I changed them to arial black, font size 12 for my eye and sent them off into cyberspace.
Buried my aunty today. I know she is in hell.
She is not here….. The screen replied, bloodstained and dark red. The reply came in rapid type faster than my friend usually typed. It was almost instantaneous-like a barked answer. I am startled at this improvement in her typing. I am going to have to work harder.
Where?
Here.
Where’s here?
Hell.
O hell?
No. Hell, hell. No O!
Bloody hell!
No, you still haven’t got it.
You really mean hell hell?
Yep.
You’ve got to be kidding? I seem to have the wrong address.
Nope.
Real hell?
Yes.
Hot hell?
Nope. Fiery hell.
Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace hell?
Mega double unimaginable fiery hell.
I don’t get it.
You don’t get hell. It gets you.
My aunty is not in hell?
Nope.
She must be.
Nope. I know she’s not here.
She should be.
Well, she isn’t.
Check.
I don’t have to. I know.
Please check your computer.
Don’t have one.
You don’t have a computer?
Nope.
What the hell, I mean’ what the Heaven’ are you then? We try not to use the ‘Hell’ word where the Heaven word does better.
Just that-Hell. The real Hell, where we know without the computer.
She’s the nastiest piece of work invented by God.
Created by God. God creates. He does not invent. Man invents.
Splitting hairs. She was a mean man. You don’t know much about her. So where is she? Purgatory?
Well God got her. We did not.
Perhaps her name has not come up on your radar yet. Late or recent entrant. Slow secretarial work?
Nope. What did she do to deserve Heaven or escape from hell, more likely?
Nothing in particular.
What did she do?
She had a catalogue of unforgivable sins.
Well she must have done something right. I checked the computer.
You don’t have one
But they do.
Who do? Voodoo?
Heaven, of course. They have everything.
Except a fiery furnace? You hacked into Heaven’s computer? Are you mad?
Yes and No and No in that order. You need a computer to hack into another computer and Heaven’s computer is unhackable anyway. Heaven sends us these minutely updated statistical reports of its successes.
Minutely?
Yes. Every minute! You’d be surprised at the numbers that pass this way per minute worldwide. Of course your minute is a day to us and your day is our minute. On a day like the Tsunami in 2004 it was 750,000 in just two hours.
No it wasn’t. Even I know the Tsunami took only 220,000. Somebody is inflating the figures. Do you get something extra per head of the dead?
Only 220,000? And you call me the devil? Wasn’t 220,000 enough for one Tsunami flood?
That’s not what I meant and you know it.
And I am not lying. This is hell remember. Too late to lie. Lying will get you nowhere here. You forget that the 220,000 were direct Tsunami deaths and some of those went to heaven and some came to hell and not divided evenly. It is not a democracy here or there. Do you think that death stood still or was so fed up or full up of Tsunami victims that she stopped reaping the usual mandatory death toll of infants with measles and malaria and diarrhoea and vomiting and torture and cot deaths. Add to that the usual suspects of speed overdosed death-wished youth on toxic drugs or in high speed crashes without safety belts on prematurely booking appointments for heaven- they think. Then there are the adults and grandparents with childbirth, accidents, cancers, drug overdoses, murders, suicides, crazy drivers, exposure, drowning and whatever.
And smoking.
Yes and smoking, but that goes under suicide. Finally there are those who die of old age when body parts burn out from long justified and judicious use. The body is registered for 70 years warrantee you know. Some of those have dodged us before and are full of spare parts. And now there are the Hurricane Katrina thousands in New Orleans and surrounding areas and the canoe hundreds in Nigeria and the hundreds of thousands to AIDS daily. Add these to the past, the Lake Nyos thousands in Cameroon’s and the Bosnian 7000. Busy, busy, busy.
Is death a she or a he or an it?Is the grim reaper just a machine?
What does it matter? It is an irrelevant triviality. A shehe or a heshe or a s-he, she, covering both bases. You humans are preoccupied with sex in all its forms. You even give a sex to tables and chairs. That is the extent of you deviousness.Is death a she or a he? I still want to know.
It is a no-go area. It may interest you to know that their newsletter is called ‘HeavenSent’. We have one too.
Called?‘HellBent’ of course. We have imagination. We publish it widely when we have really bad numbers.
Oh!Bad as in Michael Jackson bad?
Yep. I’m bad, I’m bad….
Thank you. So you know about him do you? So my aunty is in Heaven? I cannot get over it. Life is so unfair. You should have let me testify at the trial.
No. The living are unfair to us after all the effort we put into getting them here.
Ok, what about that chap buried with five wake keepings, two commendation services, four funeral services, a variety of funeral marches including being thrown up three feet in the air and the death dance, a la voodoo. Then there were the six sites for grave options in four different exotic burial grounds, chambers and cremation venues complete with top flight coffins and gold dust specked urns. And three hundred and fifty-two cows executed in sacrifice for his funeral party, five hours of continuous nauseous TV coverage on five national television stations including a attempt to get ‘Papa is dead’ slot on Breaking News on CNN, one hundred and twenty five different six-colour full-page obituary announcements in fifteen newspapers. Not to forget the two hundred and fifty-three pages of blow-by blow I-knew-he-had-potential ultrasound pictures in-mother’s-womb, to school monitor and prefect and sportspersonofthedecade, to jobsacrossmaturingtricades to the geriatricmarathon to CON to the last walk, the last talk and the last breath. Add to that the100,000 obituary posters scattered on the roundabouts and dustbins of the nation.
He’s in my book. What is he to you?
My uncle. You should know
I know He is not.
Not what? You said he is in your book. He cannot be. He was a saint. He is a saint.
Not your uncle. Yes and No and No in that order.
He is my uncle and he is a saint.
Not your uncle.
He is my father’s brother
No, he is not.
Yes, he is
Yes, he thinks he is. Yes, you think he is or was or should be. No, he is not. DNA.
You checked his DNA
No. His DNA is there for all of us to see. And so is yours. It does not need checking. You are actually who you claim you are. But your uncle is not. Thirtyonepercent, no, thirtytwopointfour, the numbers just went up during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, of you humans are not who you claim to be or who you think you are.
You mean myuncle’snotmyunclebutmyuncledon’tknow?
He knows now and so does his dad.
And with all those credentials he is not in Heaven?
Nope. We got him.
Three hundred and fifty two cows later
We don’t make judgments on the number of cows that attend a funeral.
They don’t attend the funeral, they are eaten.
Same thing. At ten litres a cow that is three thousand five hundred and twenty litres of blood sacrificed. Sacrifice in the wrong direction- to man not God. There are no marks for funeral cows or canopies or choirs or CNN reports of your death or convoys or last posts, or boots and saddles or hired mourners or trumpet blasts or riderless horses or 100,000 obituary poster announcements blowing in the wind. All is vanity.
You sound like Heaven.
God forbid.
That’s blasphemy
Nope. God did forbid me to sound like heaven.
What about wills? My uncle, my nonDNAuncle, left some money to the Red Cross and a church. That should count for something.
Nope. Nothing. There are no good intentions done with money you have no control over. Once you are out of life’s door you are dead. Your head is no longer in control. You cannot control your empire from the grave. There is no gold in the tile-lined grave and even if there is it is useless to you. Ask King Tutankhamen if his glorious gold was of any value to his soul?
Can you get him for me?
Don’t change the subject. Good intentions planned for after death are no good intentions. They do not carry over the river of life and besides many such intentions are stuck in human courts for years by scheming children and uncles and other relations.
But why is he in Hell. He seemed so good.
When you come, you will find out everything. Got to go stoke the furnace before Hell freezes over. Ha , ha. Bye.
Wait.
I tried to get back but got no reply. As I was about to switch off I got a final e-mail. It was written in red and it read:
If this e-mail has been seen by you at all and you are still alive, it is sent in error. Please contact WhattheHell@satan.devil or www.hellonearth.hades. Subscribe to Hellbent magazine for the latest tips to reach www.gotohell.quickly
Important Health Warning: The magazine from up there, Heavensent, is for sissies and never, NEVER access the WhattheHeaven@earth.saved and never ever, never ever visit website www.heavenonearth.forever.
Disregard this message at your moral peril.
I could not get an e-mail reply after that and all my e-mails came back as Fatal Error, ‘Demonmail Error 419’.
I sit back fully awake. How have I got myself into this mess, communing with the devil directly? When in doubt go back to the beginning. I went to the top of my e-mail and decided to ‘Forward’ it to a different friend. I pressed ‘Forward’ and what happened? A new e-mail box appeared and the e-mail address of the existing mail showed. Suddenly there it was in black and white. The error, my error, glared back at me, the error that had led me to hell and back. Instead of shell@yahoo.com and contacting my friend in my tiredness, I look at what I had actually typed in. It is hell@hayoo.con. Look at the keys. You will see that ‘y’ is close to ‘h’. I had mixed up the keys on the keyboard. But that was not the end of it. I look in the box where the e-mail to be ‘Forward’ed is now residing. I am horrified, scandalised and terrified. What I see unlocked the real key to the unknown direction of my e-mails. By typing ‘Dead u’ instead of ‘Dear u,’ I had unleashed the devil, and I mean the devil.
But it is a simple enough mistake. I always make it. Don’t you? Once I typed a letter ‘Dead Aunty’ and, without checking it, I sent it off with a Gappy Nirthday he-mail, sorry Happy Birthday e-mail. Typos, typos everywhere. She was not amused and even died shortly after. I had problems with the police when they checked through her she-mails for threatening mails and motive. But it is a simple enough mistake if you are a two-finger picking, self-improved and self-trained typist like 99.5% of computer users in the world. I learn today that the devil is just a typo away. A letter ‘d’ delivers evil to the devil. Take care now! And watch what key you press and do a spell check or you too will get emails from hell where ‘tribe’ easily becomes a ‘bribe’ and ‘dear’ becomes ‘dead’ and a snail’s shell becomes nails of hell.